


7 months late and no Starbucks

by wildechilde17



Series: Starbucks and infants [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Clint Barton's Farm, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Natasha Feels, Protective Clint, Unplanned Pregnancy, Where Was Clint Barton During Captain America 2?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-10 11:21:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3288476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildechilde17/pseuds/wildechilde17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Natasha that opened the fucktastic door of that crappy apartment though was a damn sight different from the Natasha he’d last seen going on seven months ago.</p><p>"No fucking way,” was the first thing out of his dumb mouth.</p><p>“Barton,” she’d said, “You took your sweet time.  Where’s the Starbucks?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

This is no place for a child to sleep let alone to raise a child, hell, he hasn’t slept in going on 39 hours and he’s pretty sure if he had any kind of choice he’d keep going until he found somewhere else to sleep himself. He hasn’t had time for choice since he got back. He’s got whiplash from the sheer speed of that information dump, the one that hit him the second he found her again. 

He gets up and stretches, weighing his head down with his hand and feeling the tense muscles give and lengthen. This place gives him the creeps, too many disjointed and forgotten memories left lying around. He drags his head to the other side and feels a tell-tale pop of synovial fluid. He’d groan but she’s finally conked out on the couch and no one’s crying for a change. If he’s the reason either of them wake up there will be more then hell to pay. 

A week and a half ago when he’d tracked her new alias down to a crappy apartment in a shitty end of a buttfuck nowhere kind of town, he’d thought they’d need to make a getaway. He knew Natasha and Natasha would say if he could find her so could Hydra and he’d argue a little, kiss her a lot, push her up against the wall and do what they’d both be desperate to do and then they’d run. The Natasha that opened the fucktastic door of that crappy apartment though was a damn sight different from the Natasha he’d last seen going on seven months ago.

“No fucking way,” was the first thing out of his dumb mouth.

“Barton,” she’d said, “You took your sweet time. Where’s the Starbucks?”

“No fucking…” he’d repeated transfixed by her swollen belly. 

“Way,” she finished for him, “Get in. I’ve got a bug out bag but you’re later than I’d hoped.” He sidled past her into an apartment that could belong to anyone, there were even picture frames with people he’d never seen and he’d be willing to bet Natasha’s never met resting against the baseboards fostering an impression of a person who has just moved in and might just move out again. 

“You’re pregnant!?”

“You’ve got a car?” she asked in reply. Her hair, still red, longer again but looped in a messy bun, is tucked under a winter cap while he scanned her. It’s always red, the one thing she never changes.

“Yeah. Natasha, give me the damn sit rep at least!”

“Yes pregnant, 37 weeks, healthy apparently, despite the fall of SHIELD. They’re not expecting a pregnant black widow, an upside in maintaining this cover.” She shrugged a little then slid a hand down over the bump, stretching the black tank top that tucks somewhere he couldn’t see into what he assumed were maternity jeans. The only thing he’d really registered was the gestational count. 

“37 weeks?” He wanted to drop all pretence of getting out of there and throw himself down on the nondescript beige couch. He wanted to start what he knows will be an argument with a frankly pointless ‘and you didn’t fucking tell me?!’

“Hawkeye,” she said as if reading his mind, a small rebuke in the way she shook her head and a ‘get your head in the game’ in the way she used his call sign. 

“Yeah, yeah where’s the bag?”

She indicated a large black sports bag beside another open doorway. He kept talking as he hoisted the bag onto his shoulder, “I haven’t got a tail as far as I can tell. You need anything else not in the bag? Pregnant stuff? Baby stuff?”

“No,” a smile graced her lips telling him how awkward he sounded. 

“Right.”

“In transit. I’ll explain in transit.”

“Yeah,” he said accepting the pragmatic olive branch.

He shifted his bow to make room for her bag and caught himself staring as Natasha lowered herself into the passenger seat far more gingerly and slowly than he’d ever seen her move. He had begun to regret the four or five protein bar wrappers that had littered the front seat by the time he got back to her. If she’d been the Natasha he was expecting he would have grinned and shrugged off her annoyance but she wasn’t that Natasha, she was somebody’s mother or soon to be mother and he couldn’t shake off the feeling that he should be more respectful or something. 

He waited as long as he could for her explanation to come. He’d take it however it came, a clipped sit rep, a melodramatic declaration, a heart stopping confession that it was Cap's kid she was carrying. Nothing came. She wiggled in the seat, arching her back then huffing into silence. 

“So the kid? The kid's mine,” he asked taking a stab in the dark. They’d been fucking for a while before he left but they’d never defined anything. 

“Yes.”

“Fuck.”

“I wasn’t certain you were still alive.” Quick and perfunctory, the words came, despite the wasp like stings they brought. He’d done his best to get back when everything went… what’s worse than pear shaped? Gourd shaped? Banana shaped? When everything went Loki level fucked. He’d ducked and covered, he’d zigged, he’d zagged. He’d even taken out his own handler when it turned out she was one of those heads Hydra kept talking about. “I made the best decision I could with the information I had.” 

“Decision?” he asked confused, turning to look at her despite the long road ahead. She kept her eyes firmly on the road and he’d wondered if he’d ever find a way to ask for forgiveness for the things that he had not been responsible for. “To have the kid? Tasha, you gotta know if I’d been here… I’ve got your back, no matter what.”

“Is that true even now?” he heard her ask as he turned back, her voice strangely small. 

“Yeah, of course it is.”

“And the?” in his periphery she spread her hands over her stomach. 

“Fuck, yeah, wow there’s like a person in there isn’t there.” 

She grimaced, squirmed again in her seat and most certainly rolled her eyes, “Yes, kicking me in the ribs.”

“Well, we know for certain it’s yours then don’t we? Fuck, a kid!”

“Your kid.”

“My kid? Fuck and I thought you and Captain Underpants publishing all our shit on the World Wide Web was the…” and then a stupid grin spread across his face, he felt his lips pull upwards and he fought the way his voice threatened to crack, “My kid.”

“The… child… you have its back too?” she stuttered out the question in an act of un-Natasha like uncertainty. If she’d noticed the goofy grin he could not tell.

“Tasha,” he’d said riding the endless waves of doubt and fear on the one thing he was absolutely certain of, “I ain’t gonna promise to be an awesome father but I’m not gonna let anyone get to you or that midget…. Fuck, a father.” 

In the rear view mirror he saw her shoulders lower infinitesimally. “Clint Barton as a father is sure to be better than Natasha Romanoff as a mother.” The twist to her mouth made him want to break something.

“Now why you gotta go and say that?” he said reaching out for her with his right hand and realizing that there was less leg to grip now, he hesitated, retreating back to the steering wheel and bouncing the heel of his hand against the spoke. “Far as I can tell you did a fine job of keeping you both safe while the kid’s deadbeat dad was off being a deadbeat.”

“Running for his life in several countries with extradition treaties and an interest in appeasing the US government or in settling old debts?”

“You say potato,” he said shrugging as he flicked on the turn signal. 

“I am glad you’re back, Clint,” she replied softly, her eyebrow raising as if she were surprised by that fact as much as he was. 

“Yeah? Gotta say if I’d ever imagined this scenario, and I never have, I’d have figured you’d be more pissed off.”

“I was.”

“So the great Hawkeye timing hasn’t failed me yet?” he smirked.

“Don’t push it hot shot,” she said, the space between her eyebrows creasing as she gazed up at his reflection in the mirror, “I can be pissed with you like that.” She clicked and then dropping her hand back to its resting position on the make shift self of her stomach she sighed, “Right now I’m just relieved I don’t have to do the next bit alone.”

“Next bit?” he said without thinking, “Oh fuck. Yeah. Okay. We got this.”

“I am glad you’re so confident.”

“While you’re not pissed at me can I ask how this happened?”

“Hmm? Really?” she said suddenly grinning. 

“Yeah I mean I thought…”

“When a man likes a woman very much certain physical changes occur to his…” She blinks one too many times when she’s being facetious, no one would believe the legendary Black Widow loves bad jokes as much as she does. He supposes, in the end, that ones on him too. 

“Yeah, yeah, laugh riot,” he answered dryly knowing that if he didn’t cut her off she would keep going, finding delight in bad puns and dad jokes. “SHIELD has all its agents on active duty on birth control and….”

“SHIELD is gone Clint,” she said and like that the joy had left her voice. Every sentence was a new alley they could go down, a new conversation they should be having. 

“37 weeks ago SHIELD was, apparently infested with Hydra, but still extremely around and, Tasha, I thought… well, the red room…”

“So did I… should be impossible,” she said quietly. 

“How impossible?”

“Impossible isn’t gradable.”

“Thanks for the grammar lesson. Impossible like the two of us should have bought a lottery ticket between sex positions or impossible like Hydra had a plan and it wasn’t plan B.”

“The former, as far as I can tell. I don’t have the resources I once had. I’ve been operating on the assumption that I can’t rule out the lat ahh,” the last syllable was swallowed by a disconcerting yelp. 

“You okay?” he asked, his eyes flicking between Natasha and the road with concern. 

“Contraction,” she answered breathlessly.

“Contraction?! Like kids coming? Shit.” He'd hurriedly evaluated the highway ahead. There had to be somewhere he could pull off. There was supposed to be welcome home sex and your ribs are bruised noises of concern, there was supposed to be real pizza while he told her how his contacts went dark and his handler had been all ‘let me kill you and hail Hydra’. There was supposed to be a hell of a lot of sleep. Then a sandwich. Then another nap. In less than half an hour he’d become the loser husband in a sitcom that’s just about to jump the shark. He wasn’t getting that nap. 

Then her hand was on his thigh, warm and firm. There was something in the way she touched him that reminded him of the way she would say to people they’d rescued, it’s not your fault. “Relax. Braxton Hicks. It’s not labor.” 

“Jesus Tash,” he said and she made to take her hand away. He caught it just in time, suddenly aware that it was the first time they’d touched in seven months. He brought her fingers to his lips, pressing a single kiss to them. She always told them it wasn’t their fault, she’d even told him that once. She must have known that she did it, a trademark, an idiosyncrasy she allowed herself. She must have known she was telling people the thing she most wanted to hear but would never believe of herself. 

“Welcome to the party Barton,” she said instead, giving him a fond yet exasperated look that said she both pitied and loved his sentimentality. He was glad of it, that that much at least had survived the last seven months. 

“This doesn’t look like a party.”

“No.”

He let her have her hand back. He wondered in the silence if he was brave enough to reach out and touch Natasha, if she would let him run his hand over the skin that hid his unborn child. 

“It’s your op Tash, you take lead and I’ll run point.”

“Just like Budapest?” she echoed, a call and response that made him smile. 

“You and I remember Budapest very differently.”

“We can’t risk a hospital.” 

No, they couldn’t, not with Hydra out there. Not with Hydra with a possible hand, a possible head, in the making of this child. Not with countless relics of the cold war with an interest in a pregnant Chyornaya Vdova. The alternative of course was to risk Natasha and to risk the infant she was carrying. It was her op, he reminded himself, it was very much her op. 

“Right.”

“I’ve got a fetal heart rate monitor and the head was engaged at my last scan.”

“We’re doing this on our own then?” he asked. 

“We’ve both got field medic training, you’ve kept me alive more times than we both could count.”

“You and I remember field medic training very differently.”

“I trust you,” she said and in an instant cut through every layer of bullshit what if, of shouldah, wouldah, couldah. Pregnancy, it seemed, would not change that ever rational surgeon’s knife at the heart of Natasha. 

“I missed so much.” And he meant that he did not want to miss anything else. 

“Yeah,” she said abruptly grinning, shifting the mood with a turn of her head. “Where the fuck were you Barton? Knock me up and leave me to take down SHIELD on my lonesome.”

“You were pregnant when hellicarriers were falling outta the sky!”

“You are usually much quicker with the math.” A curl fell from her knit cap as she spoke. 

“Natasha!” 

She rolled her head back against the head rest looking annoyed that her gambit to lighten the weighty mood had failed. “If it helps, I didn’t know.” Of course she didn’t, there was a time, he had to remind himself, that she didn’t know either. Then there had to be a moment when she knew, for sure, that she was pregnant and he hadn’t been there. He’d been running across roof tops, forging passports, hacking the backend of ESTA websites and wishing she was there. 

“When did you, you know, find out?”

“Congressional hearings.”

He nodded sharply. He’d been so happy to see her. Her hair was longer and straighter and he’d been so proud when she’d stared those overpaid figureheads down. “I saw shots of you, sometimes, between the dub, I got to hear your voice.”

“How’d I do?” she asked, shifting in her seat to move closer to him, a wicked twinkle in her eyes reflected in the mirror. 

“I would have said you were at your black widowyest… now with context… I dunno if I should be turned on by your magnificence or pissed at the risks you were taking.”

“I went with glad you’re back; you can go with turned on,” she answered, poking him in the side as punctuation. 

“Did you really think I was dead?”

“No,” she said firmly. “Yes,” she corrected equally as firm and then finally, “No, I couldn’t get any accurate intelligence and eventually I wasn’t sure if it was gut instinct or hormones telling me you were still alive.”

“If I’d known…”

“You would have been more reckless about getting back?”

“That too.”

“Are you angry?” She was curling up in the car seat as she spoke, clearly no longer able to throw her feet up on the dash board as she used to. There were darkish shadows under her eyes and he wondered if it was being alone or the pregnancy that had tired her the most. 

“I dunno now. Doesn’t feel real.” He reached behind his own seat for his coat and passed it to her. “Are you angry?” he asked as she wrapped the dark grey wool over her. “You were?”

“I… it’s strange, I must have been angry with you, with the situation, with… but there are so many other selves between me and the world. Without you to make me ask those questions, I just didn’t.” Natasha could be whomever you wanted her to be, a skill set turned survival strategy. Natasha could be whomever you wanted her to be unless you asked her to be herself. He’d come to accept that she was Clint’s Natasha with him and it might not be just Natasha but it was a close as she could manage. He’d come to accept that the attempt was a show of trust. 

“And now?” he asked, only now realizing that she might not have asked herself how she felt about being pregnant, about the child, about the future and even about his returning. Maybe she had, like him, only thought of survival. 

“Now? I’m tired and swollen.”

“Yeah right, did you have a place in mind?” Those questions and their answers wouldn’t go anywhere if they told them to fuck off till morning. 

“There’s a farm house,” she yawned looking more like a pregnant woman by the second. 

“A farm?”

“Mmm Waverly.”

“Waverly Iowa?”

“You know the way.”

“Tasha,” he said, her name becoming half a plea and half an argument.

“It’s safe. You kept it hidden. Well hidden.” 

She would not be argued with. What choice did he have, really? “Right. You sleep. I’m gonna…process.”

“You were supposed to show up with Starbucks,” she mumbled, a throwback to the way she had greeted him. 

“Got no idea what that means Red,” he said and tucked the errant curl back into her cap, pausing a moment to stroke her cheek as her eyes closed. “Just sleep, kay, it’s gonna be a long drive.”


	2. Chapter 2

He wakes up because she saying, ‘No, no, no’ in a way that sounds like self-reproach and exhaustion. He wakes up because an infant is making the beginnings of a squalling sound, that he knows only gets louder and higher with time, right near his left ear. He didn’t take the aids out of his ears before he fell asleep, too exhausted to remind himself that he doesn’t have SHIELD medics and SHIELD tech to fix him if he gets an infection or breaks the damn things.

“I do not know how to do this. You, you are supposed to come preprogramed for this. It is sucking. It is simple. No. No. No,” she says again, her contractions disappearing in a haze of sleep deprivation and a feeling of failure. “Nyet! Pochemu ty ne sosat' grud'? Ty golodny. Ya znayu eto.”

“Tasha?” he groans, scrubbing at his face to be more awake. “Tasha, you’ve gone Russian on me, what’s wrong?”

“I cannot do this. This child, she knows. She will not suck.” She shifts again speaking to the baby in her arms, “No. Nyet.” The little girl in question has clenched her fists, her face turning furiously into Natasha’s bare breast.

“Hey. She knows nothing yet, the kid’s not making a point.”

“She finds the nipple, then spits it out and then the crying starts, she _is_ making a point,” Natasha says, beginning to look like she does just before she twists a man’s arm up behind his back.

“Maybe she’s just dumb like her old man?” he tries joking. Natasha is not pleased shifting the tiny infant in her hand and trying to push a distended nipple into the infant’s mouth. “No? ‘kay then, Tash, we got formula. I can make some up. We can try again next time,” he says, his hands hovering above Natasha’s shoulders wondering if an attempt at a shoulder massage will only get him elbowed in the gut.

“We? There is no we,” she rounds on him, her green eyes flashing in the gloom. “There is you snoring and there is me failing.”

“It’s not failing. It’s, I dunno, new baby shit.” He really doesn’t know, he’s been playing a pretty tough game of catch up since he found Natasha two weeks back. He’s just as tired as she is and well and truly behind the knowledge eight ball. He watches her wince as the baby clearly closes her gummy mouth at the wrong angle or something. Okay, she’s more tired too.

“No, no I read… is better for baby to be breastfed,” Natasha snaps again and he worries more, years of working with her, admiring her, loving her, seeing her conquer despite the worst torture and brutality and he can’t remember her sentences losing their subjects like that.

“Okay, so you try again. After you’ve slept.”

“She is crying. I cannot sleep.” The kid needs a name, the kid needs a check-up from a pediatrician and a world where she isn’t gonna get stolen by Hydra or some Red Room wannabe. The kid needs Natasha, a Natasha who doesn’t think she’s tainted her baby with the blood in her ledger.

“Natasha, give me the baby,” he orders. He takes the baby awkwardly, at some point he’s gonna learn how to do this properly, protect her neck, babies necks are floppy, don’t break the kid, he tells himself.

Natasha sags back in the bed and pushes a sweaty curl of red from her forehead. The new baby doesn’t have any hair but when she’s sleeping and her little fingers are wrapped tightly round his index finger he hopes she’ll have red hair just like Tasha’s.

For now, the baby does not sleep. She wriggles in his grasp and makes sounds less like a human and more like a cat. He looks down at her as he turns towards the kitchen, she is all pink and unfocused blue eyes. “Hey there, let’s go get you some dinner,” he says patting out a rhythm on her back, unsure if it’s to soothe the baby or himself.

He keeps talking as he takes a bottle from the draining rack on the counter and scoops out some formula, “Yeah, yeah keep crying kid. One of these days you’re gonna realize I can just turn my ears off. Not like your Mom. You gotta take it easy on her. She’s always been good at stuff, a natural, you know? So how about you make this breastfeeding thing a little easier?” A little heat not too much… he tests it in his mouth, it tastes like powdered creamer and water to him but it’s not too hot.

“So you were hungry then? We got a deal? You work out this breast feeding thing and let the big redheaded blob sleep some more and the big yellow haired blob will keep the food a coming?” There are bubbles forming on the surface of the formula as the baby rhythmically suckles. It is clear, like her Mom, she doesn’t make deals; she just let you think she’s negotiating until she has everything she wants.

Natasha is asleep against the pillows when he returns.

We can’t have a kid here, he’d thought when he’d walked through the front door. This place was cursed a long time ago and now you want me to try to be a better father than Harold Barton in the same place he used to throw me and Barney clear across the room?

Behind him Natasha waddles in. She waddles now, a graceful ballerina come assassin waddle but it’s a waddle nonetheless. Not that he will ever tell her that. He grips the bow case in his hand a little tighter. It’s the first thing he pulled from the car that was now full of Walmart bought baby shit. He needed his bow if he was gonna walk in here again, to ward of the demons, to remind himself that he isn’t the same skinny kid with the bruises from ‘falling down the stairs’, maybe to remind himself that he wasn’t his dad and he wasn’t Barney. He’d been back before, couldn’t just let the place die, but now that there was a baby coming, the memories seemed stronger and the potential for history to repeat itself tangible.

“You sure about this Natasha?” he asked.

“It’s safe. It’s hidden. Not mentioned in any SHIELD document anywhere.”

“Yeah, but neither is Disneyland.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said smirking. He looked around in dismay. There was fine layer of dust over the wooden floor, even if the storm shutters are closed when the wind picks up the damn dirt still gets in.  

“It’s just… there’s some furniture and I kept the heat on but…” He pushed his hair back with his hands, resting them on the back of his neck as he sucked in a breath of air. She kept smiling. Then she moved towards him and he questioned if she really was trying to sway her hips seductively at 37 weeks pregnant or if it was some sort of trick of the light.

“Finnish babies sleep in boxes,” she said walking two fingers up the buttons of his Henley.

“Yeah, you said that in the Walmart,” he answered catching her fingers before they could pose a problem, “and I told you I don’t care about Finnish kids, it feels wrong to put a baby in a box.”

She shrugged, looked unimpressed and turned to look at the old sofa and sideboard that still took up the sitting room. “In Russia many babies slept in drawers.”

“Can we _please_ try to give this kid a better start than the great depression?”

“I let you buy the travel crib.”

“Yeah, Walmart travel crib. Welcome to the world kid,” he said throwing his hands up in a sarcastic celebration. Natasha merely scowled.

“What is this really about Barton?”

“You were coming here if I found you or not, weren’t you? With a box for the baby and a fucking heart rate monitor.” She would have done it, he knows it, he has seen her wounded and silent too many times to have thought this would be any different. If he had not made it back in time she would have hidden here alone, screaming out into the cold night air as a child made its way into the world. She, at least, had the decency to look insulted.

“It’s a safe house. I am healthy. Women have been giving birth for as long as there have been women,” she said, low and terrible.

“Tasha! Women have been dying giving birth as long as there have been women. Fuck. Yeah, you’re healthy but you are… you’re different, anything could happen, anything could have happened.” She was supposed to have grown out of this, the distasteful indifference she had for her own life. Early on in their partnership he had screamed himself raw over her recklessness in the field. He’d told her he wouldn’t work with her if continued to take such risks. It was the only threat that had ever worked, a debt remaining unpaid.

She was very still in the face of his anger, her eyes grew large. When she spoke again it was measured as if she knew the horrors he had imagined.

“I cannot fight Clint. Not now. I could not stop them if they took the child. Not alone. If you cannot fight and win, then you run and hide.”

“I can still fight,” he said retrieving his bow case from the floor.

“With two dependents and no back up? Why, when we have another choice?”

“Because! Because. I am supposed to protect you,” he seethed and when she refused to speak he shook his head with disbelief.

She took a step towards him, “Then protect me. Here.”

“This place is not…. You don’t protect here. You don’t care here. You don’t love here.” Her eyebrow raised, her lips parted as if she wanted to say something. “You survive here. God Nat! Why here?! Here of all the…”

“There is history here, a real history, not lies or stories. If you were gone… I don’t have a history to pass on. This place is your history and a part of who you are.”

“You want this to be something we pass on?!” he asked horrified. You want to pass on that bannister, Nat? Where he pushed me so hard I was knocked unconscious? Or that corner there, where my mom would cry when he hit her? How about we pass on the first time he broke my collar bone? It’s no Red Room, I’ll grant you, but it ain’t no legacy.

“I wanted to give the child a history even if it was only for a moment.” He’d have crumbled at that, her longing for memories you could be certain of was palpable but that she said for a moment. He grabbed her pushing his fingers into her wrists.

“You better not be telling me you were making some kind of last stand here Natasha. You better not be coming here to die.” Her eyes were full and she shook her head wrenching her hands from his grip.

“Clint, if the child’s healthy and normal, what then? What life could I offer it alone?”

“You… you wanted to give it up?”

“I wanted to give it a family.”

“We could be a family!” he said, knowing that he wouldn’t even know how to begin such an enterprise.

“A spy and an assassin? How could we protect it from the danger we brought?”

“Who fucking better?! Who fucking better if something goes wrong or if, I dunno, the kid wakes up one morning and is all black widowy. Who else is gonna know who’s out there? Who’s gonna know why the kid has curly hair and likes gymnastics… who’s gonna… you can’t just… I… I gotta go… I can’t… not right now,” he said. The screen door squealed its discontent as he let it swing closed behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Нет! Почему ты не сосатьь grudь? Ты голодны. Я знаю это  
> (trans gloss) No! Why do you not suckle? You are hungry. I know it


	3. Chapter 3

The baby sleeps curled on him like a tiny hot water bottle, other times she sleeps on Natasha. In the five ish days she’s been here not once has she made use of that Walmart crib, maybe they would have been better off with a box from Finland.

Natasha is showering and he wants to join her. Everything now smells like regurgitated out of date milk. Except the baby’s head, the kid’s head is like great pizza or when you get home from a mission and find that there are actually sheets on your bed. He’s pretty sure if Natasha walks back in soon she’s gonna find him huffing in baby head like a strung out junkie.

For every hour of incessant crying, diapers with black goo and sleep that feels more like going under anaesthetic, there is baby head smell, her quick even breaths as she sleeps on you and tiny little monkey hands griping fingers and t-shirts and hair alike. He wants her to have a name, he wants her to have his name.

“There was a time when you looked at me like that?” she says from the doorway, dabbing her hair with a pink towel. They were the cheapest ones at the Walmart, he’d bought a stack saying ‘towels and boiled water, towels and boiled water’ under his breath when another Braxton Hicks hit her. She’d laughed, he missed that laugh.

“There was a time when you used to sleep too.”

“Baby thinks sleep is overrated,” she says, pushing his feet off the sofa to take a seat next to him. He hauls himself upwards, adjusting the sleeping girl on his chest as he moves. The baby makes a small snuffing sound but does not startle.

“Baby needs a name.”

“Clint,” she says as a warning and shakes her head. He puts one hand on the baby and leans forward.

“I still look at you like that Tasha,” he sighs.

He was sitting on the old porch swing when she decided to follow him. He barely looked up. She had pulled the rug out from under him. No, it was worse than that she had put the rug under him just as suddenly as she had taken it away again. It was fucking rugs all over the place. He wondered if the barn was still sturdy enough that he could get up on the roof. God, he needed distance.

“The first time you slept with me, I woke up alone,” he said, examining his hands rather than looking at her.

“I know.”

“The first seven times. Just gone. I tried not to push the issue, you know.”

“I came back,” she said.

“Sure. You came back. One day you didn’t leave,” he smiled briefly at the admission. One morning he woke up, he walked to the bathroom, eyes still shut against the morning glare. One morning, he dug around for his boxers under the bed wondering if he still had a coffee filter or if he was going to have to fish one out of the trash and when he looked up she was lying there, curled up among his sheets having moved into the warm indentation his body had left.

He shrugged tiredly, “I tried not to think anything of it. You always keep this… distance… between you and the world. I think, well, I got my hopes up anyway.” He looked up at her watching with a small frown, like the words he said were in a language she barely spoke. “Go on say it, Barton you’re an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot,” she answered, her eyebrows raising quickly.

“But I am, aren’t I Nat? Getting attached. Falling in love a little too easily.” Ah Barton, then you had to go and say the trigger word. Her eyebrows fell.

“Love is for…”

“Children?” he cut her off, perhaps a little too harshly. She looked shocked. She looked, for a moment, vulnerable, her mouth opening as if she needed to complete the phrase. “What? You’ve said it enough. You think I’d forget it? Sometimes I think it’s like those handcuffs you used to need to sleep with, little bit of programming you’d conquer some day and sometimes I think you’re trying to tell me you don’t love me without hurting me or something.”

“Clint.”

He stood up, needing to pace. She could cut him without ever saying a word. She could cut him with one word, his damn name and the pity she spoke it with. He needed to walk off the injury.

“So if love is for children Natasha… do you love this kid? ‘Cause I’m terrified, like hearing you scream through a wall and not being able to do anything about it terrified, and I think I’m already in love with the idea of this kid.”

“Clint, I can’t…” There was something broken in the way she said it.

“No, I’ll tell you what you _can’t_ do. You can’t spring this on me all ‘get the go bag Hawkeye and where’s my coffee Hawkeye’ and then… and then take it all away again.” He stopped short and knelt down in front of her. Grinding his teeth, he took her hands in his. “You included me in this. You did that. So now I get to… I get a say.”

“You get a say,” she agreed.

“Yeah, I do,” he said quietly and when he went to release her hands she neatly raised them over his, cuffing his wrists to hold him there.

“I am glad I do not have to do this alone.”

“You never had to. Natasha, there are people out there who would help you if you just asked.” Hill, Captain Rogers, Virginia Potts, hell, even Stark would have helped her if she’d asked.

“I have never had to ask before,” she said, defiantly lifting her chin. But he knew her and she meant that she should be able to do it alone, she meant that she shouldn’t need other people.

“Yeah, well, that’s ‘cause you had me tagging along.” Your six foot ish puppy dog, far too willing to pick up the slack. Not that there had ever been much slack.

“I’m glad you care about this child,” she said releasing him and smoothing the sweatshirt she wore over her stomach.

“Ha. You can’t say it can you?” he chuckled.

“Clint, you get your say,” she answered instead, wrinkling her nose with annoyance as she spoke.

“I should be happy enough with that? Yeah, okay, I’ll try not to push it.” She brushed past him to get into the house. He thought for a moment he could catch her and kiss her. It would be simple and physical, the two things they’d mastered. He could kiss her and they could pretend everything that came before and everything that was still to come didn’t exist. He could kiss her.

He could have kissed her, instead he let her go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I work unbeta'd and dyslexically so if anyone wanted to beta this story... yeah... I'm just gonna be over here.


	4. Chapter 4

He brings her soup and crackers from the kitchen and hopes he can tempt her, later, with some cheese and apples. She’s nursing again, leaning back against the old cushions of the sofa and her natural curls are swept back over her shoulder. She winces and then takes unnaturally measured breaths, one, two and three.

“Still hurts, huh?”

“I didn’t say that,” she responds looking up at him, as composed as always, as he approaches. He puts the soup and crackers down on the upended milk crate they’ve been using as a coffee table.

“Yeah but you’re getting that look on your face, the one you used to make when your pain meds were running out,” he moves to the door to take off his boots, “after that bastard shot you,” he adds.

“Which one?” she asks as he’s kicking them off, her voice is so smooth and even an eavesdropper would have trouble comprehending that she is asking which, of her many bullet wounds in particular and which of the many bastards she has come across, is the one that he references.

“The ghost.”

It’s natural that he brings up the Russian ghost again, she’s told him a little of the fall of SHIELD in between night feeds in the early hours of the morning. Natasha has always had an easier time communicating in the dimly lit times, the darkness of a shared bed, his roof perch in the twilight, runways just before dawn. He’s long known that she’ll tell you more when she is obscured by gloom.

“It’s breastfeeding, it’s not a gun shot,” she says dismissively and he leans over her shoulder watching the little face cupped to Natasha’s breast with blue eyes slowly drooping.

“You’re allowed to say it hurts.”

“And you?” One day, he thinks,Natasha will actually admit something hurts. It will probably be the bone she throws him when he’s dying, maybe he doesn’t really need her to confess her pain that much. Natasha removes the child who is no longer sucking as much as drifting off to sleep.

“Me? Breastfeeding is great for me,” he grins as he sits beside her on the sofa. Natasha rolls her eyes and passes him the baby. He takes the infant trying hard to support her neck and rearrange her without too much jiggling. Finally he gets her settled on his shoulder, beginning the pat, pat, pat that accompanies the feedings end.

“Yes, you have always been a breast man,” says Natasha once again hiding her magnificent breasts from view. Intellectually, he knows that breasts are meant for something more than that his enjoyment but he can’t help but feel sad that he no longer has a claim on them. Natasha would definitely hit him if he said that out loud, so he sighs longingly instead.

“So, the kicking and the playing us until she gets exactly what she wants she gets from you and the breast thing she gets from me? Feel kinda like I got screwed in the genetic lottery here.”

Natasha raises her eyebrows and smiles broadly, “Screwed? Very much so.” There is always something wicked in Natasha’s smiles.

“Glad to see that terrible sense of humor of yours didn’t disappear entirely.”

Natasha reaches for her crackers, crumbling them between three fingers over the reheated soup. “She has your eyes, Clint,” she says as she collects the spoon.

“Really?” he says, smiling and trying to catch a glimpse of the little girl leaking milk upon his shoulder.

Natasha shakes her head before blowing on a spoonful of soup. He thinks she’s going to ignore him but instead she answers with a firm, “Yes.”

“Nah, Really?”

“And now you get to change the next diaper,” she says in the same tone she would use when a lost bet got him the paperwork duties.

“Aw diaper no.”

He had been chopping wood for half an hour maybe more when she returned. A walk, because she was going stir crazy, unable to train, unable to leave the farm and unable to wait the two more weeks till the baby was due without shooting something. A walk was a compromise, a walk was a necessity.

“Hey,” she said, appearing as always as if from thin air.

“Hey,” he answered and gestured to the axe in his hand, “We needed wood.”

“Need help getting it inside?”

Clint scanned her top to toe. She seemed unaffected by the hours of walking and god knows what else she was doing on the property. “Pretty sure you aren’t supposed to lift things.”

“Pretty sure?” she replied, raising a single eyebrow.

“I dunno, doesn’t the baby like pop out or something if a pregnant woman lifts things,” he said squinting into the lowering sun behind her, “seems like people are always saying that you ain’t supposed to lift things.”

Natasha smiled, a small forgiving smile that he had only seen when he was doped up in hospital or lying broken 6 floors down from where he’d started. “I believe it has to do with hormones changing the elasticity of the ligaments.”

“Someone’s been reading baby books,” he said pointedly before wiping his face on the hem of his t-shirt.

“I can lift a couple of logs, Barton.”

“Nah, leave it,” he said, knowing better than to challenge Natasha’s physical capabilities and still not certain that lifting things didn’t cause babies to come popping out. “One of us heroes has to stay in shape,” he joked instead.

Natasha’s eyes grew large, “This is a shape.”

He knew it to be true, Natasha’s body once again adapting perfectly to the task she put it to. They were both aware, however, that this task was bringing a little stranger into the world and not, perhaps, for leaping across catwalks and breaking men’s necks with her thighs.

He gave her a single sharp nod and then smiled, “Doubt the cat suit would zip up at the moment.”

“I could still kick your ass,” she said as he collected a pile of logs, scooping them into his bent elbow.

“By sitting on me,” he laughed. They used to play this game a lot, before Loki, before Strike Team Delta disintegrated under the weight of superheroes. Over coms and in the back of transports, once up a tree in a snow covered forest, who was the best, who could kick whose ass, their own warped version of cavemen versus astronauts.

Natasha did not really smile at this though her mouth remained turned upwards. Her eyes became cold, her body still and in the low tones of the Black Widow she said, “Pregnancy provides so many more places to hide my knives than those slinky little dresses ever did.”

“God you’re terrifying.”

“Good,” she said as a real smile returned.

“Tasha?”

“Yes?”

“Can I…” he gestured with his free hand to her pregnant belly.

“Yes,” she answered though he was sure a little uncertainty flickered across her face.

“Wow.”

“Wow?”

“Yeah. Less squishy than I thought.”

“Squishy? Really, Clint?” but her voice was more bemused than annoyed.

“Shit, it moved,” he said as the surface of her skin suddenly distended and retracted beneath his hand. There really was a little person in there.

“Kicking.”

“Kicking,” he echoed, his hands still spread across the curve of her belly. Natasha reached up for him drawing him down until she could press her lips against his. He stuttered for a moment before opening his mouth to her. Dropping all of the splintered wood in his left arm he pulled her as close as he could, his right hand moving to her hip. It was nothing like the first kiss he’d imagined when he was trying to find her again. There was no frantic motions, hands in hair and her legs around his waist, just the surprising gentleness of her touch and the taste of her in his mouth.

“I missed you Tasha,” he said, resting his forehead against hers.

“You’re here now.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here before now.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t have a choice,” she said, an echo of the thousands of times she’d cared for someone else above herself.

“Yeah, I’m still sorry.”

“I know.” Natasha curled into him. She was warm, between them there was a third unknown person and he wondered if this is what it meant to be complete.

Natasha eventually pulled back, her red hair making flame like patterns in the dying light. He ran his hand through his own hair as he catalogued the many ways he could screw up the silence.

“We’re gonna talk about this, aren’t we? What happens next? What our options are?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Just not now?”

“Just not now,” she confirmed.


	5. Chapter 5

Clint gets up. He can’t sleep. The lack of regular training and the presence of a tiny baby girl doing strange things to his natural ability to sleep anywhere and any when. He scoops the infant from the crescent of Natasha’s curled body. The baby’s blue eyes are wide and searching out the small distance she can probably bring into focus. As soon as she gets the focus thing down he’s gonna teach her to shoot, he thinks, bringing her thumb and pinkie together as her three remaining fingers clutch automatically around his thumb.

He takes her for a walk, talking softly about what ever floats through his head. He has taken to giving her names as he talks, place names as place holders for a name that Natasha refuses to discuss. He calls her Sienna for the place in Italy where he remembers Natasha complaining about the heat, the first time he remembers her complaining about anything. He calls her Baikal for the freshwater lake, the color of her eyes. Sometimes he calls her Johannesburg, Sarrat, Thiès and Saimaa, all places he has been with Natasha. He names her a thousand different ways, intent on her having some proof she is known and wanted.

The baby stares back at his face, placidly listening to his voice. Each bubble she blows, each wet diaper and high pitch wail is reassurance. She is still too small to really understand the names he gives her or the fear they have that she is more than what she seems. He makes a circle of the old farm house as he talks, careful never to mention that this is the same place he was a baby, he doesn’t want her to carry that weight too.

When he returns to the bed room, Natasha is no longer where he left her. He blinks down at the wrinkles in the quilt cover for a fraction of a second before he is aware of the shadow next to him, a touch deeper than it should be, and the glock that moves out of it aiming for his head.

“Where is my child?” she growls.

He freezes not daring to turn towards her. “Tasha. She’s right here. I have her.”

“You took her.”

“Put the gun down damn it, I took her for a walk. Tasha, it’s me, it’s only me.” In his periphery the gun slowly drops. He turns towards her showing her the baby in his arms. Natasha visibly sags. The baby begins to cry. “Hey, hey Budapest, Kiddo don’t do that.”

“Give her to me.”

“Give me the fucking gun then Natasha.” In the most awkward of swaps she hands him her gun, taking the baby.

“You pulled a _gun_ on me?!” he demands, quickly unloading the glock and pocketing the ammunition.

“Tishe, tishe,” Natasha sings rocking the baby.

“Natasha, what were you thinking?” he says as she turns to walk back to the bed. She sits holding the child to her breast as she looks up at him. Her eyes are wide and the greens of her irises swim. “Tash are you crying?”

“You cannot name our child Budapest,” she says instead of answering, her s becoming palatal out of a habitual way she corrects his pronunciation. When she looks down again at the baby he is certain a tear falls from her eye.

She walked for hours one afternoon, he set up in the barn and shot until the string cut through his callouses. He was pulling his arrows from the tight stack of hay at the back of the barn when she came back.

“Clint,” she said, “It’s time. The waters have broken.” He shoved the arrows back into his hip quiver and returned to her with a sharp nod.

“Right. Kid’s in a hurry.” Early, but not by too much. There shouldn’t be any complications. There better not be any complications.

“Doesn’t have their father’s timing,” she said leaning against the barn door. He rolled his eyes seeing little point in arguing.

“Let’s get you back inside.”

She closed her eyes, her right arm shifting to her lower back but she maintained her light tone, “Oh? We aren’t going to have a baby in a manger then?”

“Sorry,” he said shaking his head and herding her out the door, “any wise men or shepherds show up, I’ll probably shoot them.” He slung his bow over his shoulder.

“Not if I shoot them first,” she grinned.

He wrapped an arm around her waist to help her up the porch stairs, “Really not the angel of the lord kinda people, are we,” he chuckled though his focus remained fixed on getting her inside to the makeshift delivery room they’d set up. Boiled water and towels, boiled water and towels.

“Now, now,” she admonished as he helped her remove her coat. “The angel of death is still an angel of the lord.”

“Yeah, really? I missed a lot of that bible stuff growing up.” He got her settled on the sofa covered in clean sheets, knees up and pillows anywhere she needed. She closed her eyes again, breathing long deep breaths.

“You play the poor uneducated carnie card far too often, Barton,” she said when the pain seemed to pass.

“Yeah? Well, this poor uneducated carnie’s about to deliver your kid so who’s the loser now.” He gestured to her belly and raised his eyebrows cynically.

“The contractions are three to four minutes apart.” She licked her bottom lip giving him a long look. Natasha had a way of looking right into his soul, seeing all the stupid mistakes and insecurities and yet for some reason she always finished with the corners of her mouth curving upwards as if they did not matter at all. “I believe we are about to find out.”

He hung his bow and quiver on the hooks on the far wall. He left the bow strung for the reasons they skirted around. He washed his hands in the kitchen, taking his time to scrub each finger with a new scrub brush and soap.

From the sink he called out to her, “You want me to tell you to do that weird puffing thing?”

“You want me to split your lip?” she called back.

“Thought as much,” he said poking his head from the edge of the door as he grabbed the med kit on the counter. Natasha had got the fetal monitor out of its case as he walked back. She stopped short her fingers tightly clenching the strapping. He felt the urge to reach out for her hand and let her force some of her pain into his own hand. He stood by, watching the sweat bead on her forehead, knowing Natasha preferred to fight her way through pain alone. A minute passed marked only by her heavy breaths.

“You need to check how dilated I am,” she said, her eyes open again.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, snapping on the surgical gloves from the kit. “You comfortable?”

“I’m in labor,” she answered with a small twist of her mouth.

“Right…” he said, his voice rising in intonation. Between her legs he pushed his hand, up, under, in, feeling for the ring of muscle. He felt Natasha tense and then force herself to relax. Count the fingers, don’t concentrate on the smooth skin beyond. He pulled his hand away.

He took a deep breath and pulled off the used glove. “‘kay using the fingertip method you’re about 7 cm.”

“We have some time,” she said her voice cracking as it did, from time to time, when she was trying to convince him that stitches were fun and it was an exciting challenge to see how long you could hold your breath in freezing water.

“Not that much. You need anything? Water, ice, back rub, bullet to bite down on?” he asked, helping her to belt the heart rate monitor. Natasha shook her head and then focused hard on a spot to the left of his head. He watched the numbers on the reader climb and then stop, hovering up and down one and two points in green flashing lines. “Fetal heart rates 140. Perfect.”

“Perfect,” she repeated through gritted teeth.

He smiled softly, drawing himself backwards to sit on the arm of the sofa, the only distance he could find. He rested his elbow on his knee and pushed his fist against his cheek, watching in awe as she worked through two more contractions.

“Tell me when you wanna push okay?” he said, finally breaking the silence. Her head snapped up as though she had only just remembered he was there.

“When the child’s born you need to check…” she said, an order, quick and clipped.

“APGAR, yeah, I got it.”

“Yes,” she said her brow furrowing, “but Clint… HYDRA… check for HYDRA.”

“The kids not gonna come out with a red octopus tattoo, Nat.”

“Clint.”

“If there is anything, Nat, I’ll tell you,” he said moving off his perch. “Let’s just get through this first okay?”

“Anything?” she asked and her tone had turned to begging.

“Anything,” he agreed gently. He kissed her forehead, moving her soft red curls back and stroking her cheek once before letting her go again. She must have seen the truth in his eyes. She lapsed back into silence, years of training making her uneasily quiet when in pain.

He remembered Coulson telling him once that old post war Soviet sleeper agents had been caught because of childbirth. The pain was nothing you could be prepared for and in their desperation, delirium or their desire to reach out for the oldest most comforting thing they could find these women had cried out in Russian. The Red Room was yet to come. The Black Widow program had done its best to make sure that that never happened again.

The old world spies had never thought to contend with Natasha Romanoff. They had taken everything from her and yet here and now she was taking something precious back. He wondered if she did not cry out in Russian because of spite or because she had been subjected to more pain than he could ever imagine well before this child.

“I need to push,” she said suddenly.

“Okay, let me check okay? Don’t push just yet…” He put on more gloves and pushed her knees apart. His fingertips searching inside her as her breaths turned to pants. “You’re good to go Tasha, fully dilated.”

Her contractions seemed to pile upon each other as she pushed one foot into his shoulder. Natasha heaved, her eyes bright in her glowing face.

“You got this, I seen you take a man down with a collapsed lung. You got this. I know, it was just one shot but this is, like, three more pushes. Three more.” He could tell she was thinking he couldn’t possibly know, he could tell she was thinking he should shut up. She pushed again despite his rambling. All too quickly for him there was the rounded top of the baby’s head pressing into his hand. He pushed back the towels covering Natasha thighs.

“Good work. Tasha, you gotta stop pushing okay?” Natasha grimaced and tossed her head to the side. “I can feel the baby’s head. Just breathe. Baby’s coming.” Natasha hands clawed at the sheets they had laid across the sofa. He could feel the head sliding into his hand.

“Bet you want that bullet now,” he said glibly and Natasha groaned at him, her foot pressing harder into his shoulder.

“Heads out,” he cried out, looking shocked at the tiny purple and cream colored head in his hand.

“Tash, keep breathing. Don’t push! Just gonna make sure there’s no cord,” he said easing a fingertip between Natasha and the baby’s neck making sure nothing was tangled in the tight canal. “We’re good, baby’s turning. Shoulder.” More baby, more goop, protect the neck, drag the baby upwards towards Natasha. Two shoulders. A whole baby.

“Fucking Hell! That’s fucking slippery.” There was a baby in his hands, a whole new person, covered in the most disgusting… and then the baby cried, thin and high but loud. He heard Natasha gasp.

“Tasha. Tasha. She’s pink, she’s… she’s a she,” he cried out, climbing to his knees to put the infant on Natasha’s chest. “Here take her!”

“She’s crying,” Clint saw her mouth under the sound of the infant, she cupped the child to her sternum.

“Yeah, she’s crying,” he felt himself grin. “She’s got some lungs on her.”

“She’s crying, Clint.”

“Yeah,” he said, fighting through the overwhelming sense of shock to count off the APGAR points he’d memorized late at night when the curve of her in his bed had reminded and terrified him of what was to come. Pink, she was pink, under the goop she was pink. She was crying. She had wriggled in his hands…

“Ten fingers, ten toes,” Natasha said with a kind of awe he’d never heard in her voice.

“No tattoo,” he pointed out.

He watched her lips closely and saw her say, as much to the baby as to him, “A little girl,” and he realized she had refused to think about the baby as a boy or a girl until that moment.

“Here take a clean towel, just, uh, keep her warm against you.” It was hard to take his eyes away from the infant nuzzling into Natasha’s breast, already searching out her first meal.

“She’s beautiful Natasha. Beautiful”

“I can’t tell,” Natasha answered tightly, running a finger lightly over the baby’s skin.

“You can’t tell?”

“Is there anything wrong with her?” she replied, panic lighting up her eyes.

“Tasha, she’s healthy, she’s strong.” He rounded the sofa leaning over the pair, watching the infant settle in her mother’s arms.

“I thought I would be able to see if they’d done something to her.”

He looked down at the baby and then the infant opened her eyes. He let out the breath he did not remember holding. The baby’s eyes were blue but they were not the vivid, cruel blue his own had been in security footage from the helicarrier, the baby’s eyes were soft, unfocused blue. The baby’s eyes were baby blue.

“She’s okay, Tasha,” he said, kneeling down to kiss her hard.   

“She’s okay?” she asked again when he pulled back.

“More than okay, she’s perfect.”

“She’s okay.”

“You did good. I’m gonna tie off the cord”

Shoe laces, the emergency handbook said, they could do better than shoe laces. A few inches apart, wait until you can’t feel a pulse. Don’t pull on it, Barton.

“She’s okay,” Natasha repeated when he pulled off the gloves. It had fast become her mantra.

The baby in her arms had no hair, she was pink and wrinkled, a puffy little face with a tiny nose and giant eyes. The baby had lips like the cheap kewpie dolls you could win at Carson’s if the guy running the stand liked the look of the girl playing ring toss. The baby looked just like every other baby he’d ever seen and yet, and yet she was absolutely beautiful. The little girl Natasha had fought so hard to bring into the world, the little girl who had worked miracles in getting here… she was his.  

“I want to keep her Natasha.”

Natasha as always took refuge in silence.

Of course he wasn’t going to call the kid Budapest but Natasha wasn’t saying that was she. She was saying he didn’t get to give her a name at all. He’d had it, the sleeplessness, the worry and the ever increasing distance between them. She had pulled a fucking gun on him.

“Yeah?! She needs a name Natasha. She needs a birth certificate or a good forgery. She needs to be weighed on something other than kitchen scales and vaccinations and fuck if I know…”

“And if…” Natasha says quickly shaking her head.

“If? Tasha, I want to keep her. I want her to stay ours,” he says, for all the distance, for all the times she’d refused to answer, he still wanted to do this with her. Clint wasn’t sure he knew how to do much of anything without her anymore. More quietly he adds, “I think you want to keep her too.”

“You cannot name our child Budapest,” Natasha answers as if he had said nothing of consequence.

“And you can’t call her 'baby' forever! Tasha, even if you send her away… give her a name.”

“Send her away?” Natasha stands, holding the baby a fraction tighter.

“Isn’t that what this is about?”

“Sending her away?” Her stance widens, her eyes darken and her voice lowers.

“Okay, so… she stays?” he says fanning his hands out in front of him as a sign of surrender. He steps closer looking into his daughters eyes “You hear that little New Mexico? Natasha?”

“They might still take her.” Natasha looks alarmed, rocking back from him.

Just over two weeks in this fucking house and he’s been consumed by fragments of memories, bannisters and wardrobes starting his heart racing unaccountably. When he pulls out his aids he still hears voices, a soft pleading female voice. Once, in the shower, he was certain he heard Barney telling him to wake up and get to the barn, get up high. Memories and history, damaged in his head but reasserting themselves with a vengeance.

When he pulls her closer to him, his hands on her upper arms, he can feel the tension she holds in them. It’s worse for Natasha, she is never absolutely certain what she remembers is true, always suspicious of the good and always looking for the blood soaked reality hidden somewhere in her memory.

She has kept her ledger so precisely, each good deed weighed against a past she shouldn’t have to pay for. The idea of this child being entered in to that ledger, as a deed good or bad instead of remaining their daughter, must haunt her. The idea of this child being handed her own ledger and her own terrifying history must break her.

“They can fucking die trying,” he snarls.

“Clint.”

“Tasha, they will die trying. We have friends. You think… Jesus, Tash, Captain America isn’t gonna to let them take your baby. Hell, I think you give Stark one look at that little face and there will be an army of ‘bots around that travel cot.”

It’s been his plan for days now. Get a message to Hill. They can’t hide out pretending they aren’t who they are. Aliases and moving year after year, hoping not do be discovered, to be recognized, slowly losing the skills that kept them alive all these years, won’t work. He couldn’t stand by and let others protect the earth, protect his child and he knows she couldn’t do it either.

“Erzabet,” he thinks he hears her say.

“Huh?”

“Erzsébet. Elizabeth,” she repeats looking up at him so he can see her lips form the sounds.

“Like the Queen of England?”                   

“The Bridge. In Budapest,” she says and for a moment he’s back there, three arrows left, she’s bleeding and they’re surrounded.

“A name? Tash, it got pretty bloody on Erzsébet híd.”

She nods, certain. “The child of assassins should have a name born in blood and a life free of it. Elizabeth.”

“Okay, yeah, I can see that,” he says, slipping his finger back into the little girl’s fist, “Elizabeth. Better than Abidjan. Little girl, you’ve got a name.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you feel like reading more that's in keeping with canon please see my Business trilogy in many parts. Thank you all for reading this little fic.


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